Australia

I love epics. Grand sweeping shots of beautiful landscape, stories spanning decades, characters larger than life. I rarely mind the runtime and I love just sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to watch a three- or four-hour movie. Lawrence of Arabia is among my favourite movies ever.

Australia though, was just a little too much. Baz Luhrmann has tried to do too much; to have his cake and eat it too, as it were.

The movie starts with Nicole Kidman arriving down under; she has inherited a ranch from her deceased husband. The timeframe is pre-WWII. She’s an English aristocrat and doesn’t know anything about the outback. There is a cattle war, and she has to protect her land as well as her animals. She joins up with cattle herder Hugh Jackman.

I really liked the first half of this film. It was sweeping, gorgeous, and slightly silly. The cattle drive is exciting, and I felt like we got to know these characters a little bit. It showed promise, and I thought it might be a story in the vein of The African Queen. But then Luhrmann switches gears and introduces the wartime story: the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese. This is when the movie completely lost me. Instead of just being content with telling the love story, he had to go all-out and stage a grand, contrived war sequence. He should have quit while he was ahead.

There are many things wrong with this movie. For one, Luhrmann has said he wanted to tell the story of the stolen generation, but the aborigines are used more as a cheap framing device for the romance and their plight is not really explored at all. I felt bad for the kid, Nullah (Brandon Walters), for being used in this way. He was charming, and his character deserved so much more.

The characters overall are stereotypical, and the villains are either underused (Bryan Brown) or ridiculous (David Wenham). The dialogue is mostly insipid and unintentionally funny. That said, I did like some of the humour here, intentional and not. It lightens the mood a little bit.

Luhrmann shoots this just as you might expect; a lot of sweeping shots of the sprawling landscape, using soft, blurry matte filters. This lends the film a kind of dreamy quality, which is enjoyable in moderation, but annoying in excess. He also has a lot of overly dramatic closeups — which made me laugh more than anything — and an unnecessary amount of CGI.

The love story is also a bit silly. For a prime example of this, check out the Hugh Jackman shower scene. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to be laughing at this scene, but I was. It was all so cartoonish. I was half expecting people to break out in song, or for Nicole Kidman to faint. Jackman is pretty, obviously, but it takes a bit more than washboard abs to impress me. It’s called acting.

That all said, I did mostly have a good time with Australia. It’s grand, it’s silly, it’s a little too much. But hey, it looks pretty and I wasn’t bored, which is saying something for a three-hour movie. Maybe I was just in the right mood, but I did kind of like it, despite of its many flaws.